VSAONLINE. SEASON 11. December 1, 20:00GMT. Pouya Bashivan.
Evgeny Osipov
Dear all,
Welcome to the next talk of Season 11 on VSAONLINE. Pouya Bashivan, McGill University, Canada will give a talk
”Building spatial world models from sparse transitional episodic memories”
Date: December 1, 2025
Time: 20:00 GMT
Zoom: https://ltu-se.zoom.us/j/65564790287
Title: Many animals possess a remarkable capacity to rapidly construct flexible mental models of their environments. These world models are crucial for ethologically relevant behaviors such as navigation, exploration, and planning. The ability to form episodic memories and make inferences based on these sparse experiences is believed to underpin the efficiency and adaptability of these models in the brain. Here, we ask: Can a neural network learn to construct a spatial model of its surroundings from sparse and disjoint episodic memories? We formulate the problem in a simulated world and propose a novel framework, the Episodic Spatial World Model (ESWM), as a potential answer. We show that ESWM is highly sample-efficient, requiring minimal observations to construct a robust representation of the environment. It is also inherently adaptive, allowing for rapid updates when the environment changes. In addition, we demonstrate that ESWM readily enables near-optimal strategies for exploring novel environments and navigating between arbitrary points, all without the need for additional training.
Evgeny Osipov
Dear all,
This is a reminder about the VSAONLINE talk in less than one hour. See the description below. Welcome!